INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => Media Center 15 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: AndrewFG on February 20, 2011, 07:48:19 am

Title: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: AndrewFG on February 20, 2011, 07:48:19 am

In MC v15 when you do File | Library | Connect to Library and select a DLNA music library, your application does indeed start to download the respective library from the remote DLNA Content Directory. However when the remote library contains a lot of music files (mine has over 9000 tracks) this process takes a long time (several tens of minutes in my case). During this time, the user interface of  MC v15 is blocked, and it gives the impression that the application is frozen. (In truth it is not frozen; it just seems that way). => I suggest that this File | Library | Connect to Library process should be done in a separate background thread, so the user can continue to do other things...

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: StFeder on February 20, 2011, 08:11:47 am

Does "tens of minutes" mean more than ten minutes? For me MC always freezes when connecting to another MC machine using DLNA and after a few minutes I always killed it, because it stayed freezed and nothing seemed to happen. So I sticked on using the library server, which loads my library within a minute.

I'll give it another try tomorrow and give MC more time to see what happens...

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: AndrewFG on February 20, 2011, 01:32:55 pm

Quote from: StFeder on February 20, 2011, 08:11:47 am

Does "tens of minutes" mean more than ten minutes?

Yes. Last time I timed it, it took about 28 minutes to download the data on about 9200 tracks (representing about 5..6 tracks per second)...

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: MrC on February 23, 2011, 05:34:03 pm

Agreed. 

AndrewFG and I have been communicating about this indirectly offline.  This is a big issue.  There is no way to cancel either.  There's just a lot of love me long time...

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: Matt on February 23, 2011, 06:04:10 pm

For what it's worth, version 16 greatly improves DLNA server support.

With version 16, libraries from DLNA servers are loaded in a background thread.

On the first load, the library will fill in as we load from the server (it's not blocking like in v15).

The library is preserved between runs, so subsequent loads are instant.  User playlists and view customization persist.

The library is updated each restart (and also periodically if you leave Media Center running) silently in the background.

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: MrC on February 23, 2011, 06:24:39 pm

It is worth a lot!

I'm using it now, and it is a *huge* difference, thanks.

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: flac.rules on February 24, 2011, 01:21:04 am

Nice, there is some other actions that also causes the program to "freeze" someimtes (although for seconds or tens of seconds maybe, not minutes. Moving stuff to background threads seems like a good idea in general? (I am not a programmer, so I'm not very skilled in this)

Title: Re: Suggestion: Prevent (apparent) freezing of MC
Post by: vagskal on February 24, 2011, 03:13:38 am

Trying with MC 16 to load a library with +118k songs over DLNA from Squeezebox server via Whitebear just results in an error message. More details here: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=613366#post613366